673. What Is Money?

What It Covers

Composer David Lang discusses creating *The Wealth of Nations*, a new oratorio for the New York Philharmonic conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, drawing on Adam Smith's 1776 text alongside writings from Frederick Douglass, Eugene V. Debs, and Emerson to explore money, labor, trade, and moral commerce in contemporary America.

Key Questions Answered

• •Money as social infrastructure: Adam Smith's core argument, which Lang sets to music, frames money not as inherently valuable but as a token representing human labor exchanged through trade. Recognizing money as a social construct rather than an end in itself reframes economic relationships as fundamentally human connections — a perspective Lang argues modern discourse consistently loses.
• •Artistic democratization strategy: Lang co-founded Bang on a Can in the late 1980s with composers Julia Wolf and Michael Gordon, running 12-hour contemporary music marathons with alcohol served deliberately to lower barriers. The tactic expanded audiences by removing the intimidation of formal concert settings, demonstrating that environment and accessibility shape who engages with experimental art.
• •Composing for longevity over premiere pressure: Lang manages performance anxiety by mentally framing every new piece as one that will be performed thousands of times. This removes pressure from any single performance, allowing him to treat premieres as first drafts — he plans revisions between the New York Philharmonic premiere and a subsequent Aspen Music Festival performance.
• •Community-building through participatory music: Lang's *Crowd Out* project recruited 1,000 non-auditioned community members to perform together, requiring only a few rehearsals. The design was deliberate: easy enough for non-musicians but complex enough to require collaboration, forcing neighbors to meet and depend on each other — a replicable model for using performance as civic infrastructure.
• •Literature as economic commentary: Lang identifies that canonical Western literature — Dickens, Zola, Trollope, Jane Eyre — consistently centers characters in financial crisis. He uses this pattern structurally, weaving Frederick Douglass's essay on wealth inequality and Eugene V. Debs's 1918 court speech into the oratorio to surface voices Adam Smith's original framework systematically excluded.